Content Strategy: Some Basics for the Redesign
June 2, 2023
Part of a short-format series discussing Chapter Three’s approach to digital strategy
Content is for websites what food is for restaurants – it’s their reason for being. And yet,...
Assessing Accessibility: Creating an Action Plan to Improve Access to the Web
May 23, 2023
We were recently hired to run an accessibility audit for a large, public sector client. They wanted an assessment of how well visitors with disabilities navigated their sites, as well as identifyin...
A Redesign in Support of Children's Health
March 21, 2023
The California Children's Hospital Association (CCHA) is a membership organization that champions children's health, well-being and quality of care in California's children's hospitals. Like many n...
A Global View of Quality of Life: Introducing the New HDRO Website for the United Nations Global Development Programme
July 18, 2022
It’s not every day you have an opportunity to help rethink and redesign a website that is global in its impact and audience. We've been honored to work on such an important endeavor and s...
Drupal & Pretty Paragraphs: Build better content with Layout Paragraphs
June 14, 2021
What are Layout Paragraphs?
According to their project page, Layout Paragraphs provides an intuitive drag-...
Site Migration and Refresh: Improving Access to the Research Resources of SIREN at UCSF
May 3, 2021
SIREN (Social Interventions Research and Evaluation Network) at UCSF has a mission to, “Improve health and health equity by advancing high quality research on health care sector strategie...
Language switcher for a multilingual Drupal 8 site
October 28, 2019
Recently one of our clients asked us to come up with a better language detection and redirection solution for their multilingual Drupal 8 site. Most out of the box solutions do not provide a great ...
Presentation: A Drupal City
April 11, 2018
I presented at DrupalCon Nashville about working with the City of San Francisco to make a better transaction experience for residents. Moving beyond a simple content site where we te...
MariaDB revamps inaugural M|17 Conference Site with Chapter Three
June 13, 2017
MariaDB came to Chapter Three when planning an exciting new event, the M|17 Conference in New York City. The upcoming sessions were rich in content and MariaDB wanted to work with us to m...
A Better Website Editing Experience with Modular Content Components
June 1, 2017
The editorial experience is a critical and often overlooked part of website development. A weak editorial experience means slower site updates. Without a robust and intuitive content creation proce...
How to Make a Great Website Handbook
May 16, 2017
Training is the most exciting part of a project. It’s the point when our team hands over our hard work and shows our clients how the final product will actually work for them. It can be really hard...
ADNI3 Launches on Drupal 8
April 2, 2017
Since 2004, the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) has been leading clinical trials for the purpose of finding effective methods of treatment and preventative medicine for...
The Slice Template
June 13, 2016
For the past two to three years, we’ve been evolving a flexible design solution for marketing pages. We call it the Slice Template.
What is the Slice Template?
The Slice ...
Redesigning the Bay Area Video Coalition
June 9, 2016
We crafted a stunning new website for the Bay Area Video Coalition, a leading media non-profit in San Francisco.
Why Progressive Decoupling Drupal's Front-End is a Bad Idea
January 8, 2016
Lately there has been much chatter about Drupal including a front-end framework in Drupal core. Dries has written a few times about the concept and has established that he’s interested in a future where Drupal is “progressively decoupled” from its front-end, leaving the front-end rendering to be handled piecemeal by a JavaScript framework like Angular or React. Progressive decoupling, far from being an industry standard, is a concept that has been coined in the last several months. Without a sucessful model to look at, we are staking our future on a reality that only exists in blog posts. The momentum of front end frameworks distracts from addressing more important issues, and has created a miasma of anxiety that Drupal is going to be “left-behind”, again.
Persona Best Practices
December 3, 2015
Personas are an insightful deliverable to help create better user experiences. They can be approached a number of ways depending on your end goals—whether you're redefining your brand voi...
Wireframing Template for Sketch
September 18, 2015
This was supposed to be Part 3 of my Wireframing with OmniGraffle series but the trouble is, I don’t use OmniGraffle for wireframes anymore! (It is still a great tool for building sit...
Authoring Experience (AX) Best Practices for Images in Drupal
September 3, 2015
Do you add content to Drupal websites? Have you ever found yourself in the process of uploading an image, with no clue what size to upload? Or whether Drupal will scale or crop the image? If so, yo...
Goals First, Then Tactics
July 6, 2015
When I kick off a client project, two of my first questions are:
What are your project goals?
What are your project tactics?
Most of the time, my clie...
What is a Launch Blocker?
November 21, 2014
With almost every aggressively-timed project launch, the race to the finish line can easily become a game of task resolution whack-a-mole. With anxieties running high, the pre-launch to-do list can...
5 Hurdles to Adopting Drupal 8
October 7, 2014
Drupal 8 presents major improvements to the existing Drupal ecosy...
Our Industry Needs Digital Experience Directors
October 2, 2014
Our industry needs a new position. A person whose entire job is owning, directing and overseeing a website. We need a new title for them. I propose we call them Digital Experience Directors...
Drupal WYSIWYG Best Practices
July 1, 2014
Until Drupal 8 arrives, setting up effective WYSIWYG content editing falls to us developers. For many developers, figuring out the available options and their pros and cons can be difficult. Their ...
Chapter Three Website Redesign 5.0
May 28, 2014
It is with great pleasure that we can finally announce the relaunch of the Chapter Three website! A year in the making, this site represents a culmination of efforts encompassing our evolution as a...
Using Page Tables to Deliver Meaningful Design
April 30, 2014
Page Tables are a powerful UX tool. They serve as the key step between discovery and design. They define the business goals, target audiences, and content elements on a more granular level for all ...
How to Write for the Web
February 10, 2014
Good Web writing makes a site usable. Training content administrators on how to curate content for the Web is a critical component for making sites that people love.
An Event Apart SF 2013 Recap
December 13, 2013
I just got back from An Event Apart San Francisco and my brain is about to burst. I’ll do my best to summarize my most significant lea...
Presentation: Wireframing Smarter
October 21, 2013
As the sites we build get increasingly complicated, the wireframing phase is increasingly important. Solving high-level usability challenges early in the process is less expensive and faster for you and your clients! In this talk, I'll share the techniques and tools we use at Chapter Three to quickly produce high-quality wireframes and maintain your UX sanity.
Presentation: Best Practices vs. Reality: How to Create Amazing Websites Under Un-amazing Circumstances
October 21, 2013
It's a reality that web designers, developers, and UXers live with every day: there is a tension between the best practices touted by industry leaders and the reality of getting the job done.
Wireframing With OmniGraffle, Part 2: Tips and Resources
July 22, 2013
Now that you’ve got a basic framework for your wireframes, you’re ready to dive in! You should have a fat stack of paper wireframes to work from, so the hard thinking should be done already.
...
Wireframing With OmniGraffle, Part 1: Setting up your file
July 9, 2013
I started using OmniGraffle to produce wireframes over a year ago and haven’t looked back. I went from spending weeks creating greybox-style, perfect wireframe in Fireworks to being able to knock o...
Xyratex Case Study
February 6, 2013
We created a new site for Xyratex to better communicate with its target audiences, and reflect its evolution into a solutions company.
A new website for a broader audience
Stanford Libraries Case Study
November 21, 2012
We helped Stanford’s Online Experience team create a living, growing online presence to connect people with the full expanse of Stanford University Libraries (SUL) resources. ...
Presentation: Delivering More Meaningful Designs Through Page Tables
November 1, 2012
What are page tables you ask? Page tables are a tool you can leverage in the strategy phase of your web project to help better inform the structure and content of your site.
Using page table will help you:
California Home & Design Case Study
December 3, 2011
We updated California Home + Design's (CH+D) website to reflect their new look and feel, resulting in an 80% spike in visitor traffic
Th...
DML Central Support Case Study
November 11, 2011
We increased DML's web traffic by 150% by improving the information architecture and visual design.
Continuous design improvements over the long term
7x7 Case Study
October 26, 2011
We helped 7x7 increase web traffic, improve SEO, and streamline its administrative workflow.
The problem
7x7's print magazine had an outdated website that didn't fit its reade...
Using Personas to prioritize your site's functionality
August 15, 2011
One of the hardest challenges in web design is creating a design that effectively meets the needs of a business's diversified customer base. 90% of the time, a business targets several audiences, a...
SF and Washington Examiner Case Study
May 9, 2011
We gave the SF and Washington Examiner websites a brand new look and feel, migrated them to Drupal, and revamped their information architecture.
Adapting a classic brand for the web...
At Drupalcon CPH: What We Can Learn From WordPress
August 25, 2010
In the Driesnote here at DrupalCon CopenHagen there was much speculation as to where Drupal may be in 10 years. I really hope that 10 years from now we'll be able to look back at Dries' slides and giggle at our projections, but a part of me fears that if this community doesn't change our ways, that won't be the case.
Presentation: Design 4 Drupal Video Recap
July 19, 2010
The 2010 Design 4 Drupal conference in Boston at the MIT Strata Center was a smashing success, spaning two days packed with great sessions and great folks.
